Re-Awakening: I Ascend with a Legendary class

The light took its time this round, the way first decks always did, and nine people knelt in the low red glow of the cave and let it happen without flinching.

Natalia’s came first, a slim silver bow forming across her palms, strings that hummed on their own before she’d even nocked an arrow. When she drew the string back experimentally, a single clear note rang out across the cave, and the note itself seemed to sharpen the air.

[Deck Manifested: Warsong]

”It sings,” she said, half laughing, half in awe of her own hands. ”My arrows sing.”

Marcus’s card unfolded next, and what rose from it wasn’t a weapon at all. Small, translucent markers hovered into being around him, each one shaped like a piece from some vast unseen board, drifting into position at his silent command.

[Deck Manifested: Vanguard’s Mandate]

”I can see the angles,” he said slowly, turning in place. ”Not guess them. See them.”

Maya’s manifestation folded the light around her twice before settling, and where she stood a moment later, three faint copies of her stood as well, each one moving a half beat behind the last.

[Deck Manifested: Mirage Weave]

”Hello to me,” she said, watching her own reflection blink out of sync with her real hand.

Kayla’s deck bloomed rather than formed, soft green light spreading from her palms into vines that curled gently through the air and settled, patient and glowing, along her forearms like sleeves grown from a garden nobody else could see.

[Deck Manifested: Bloomheart Ward]

”That’s warm,” she said, surprised, pressing a hand to Julian’s still-healing shoulder and watching the wound ease further just from the touch. ”That’s very warm.”

Jian’s manifestation cracked like distant thunder, lightning gathering along both fists until his knuckles glowed faint blue, patient and coiled.

[Deck Manifested: Stormfist]

”About time,” he said, and for the first time since arriving in the Wilds, he actually smiled.

Julian’s came in fire, no surprise to anyone who knew him, twin gauntlets of banked ember climbing up both forearms, heat radiating without burning the skin beneath.

[Deck Manifested: Emberclaw]

”Finally,” he breathed. ”Something that matches how this whole thing feels.”

Noah’s blade formed slow and quiet, a single sword that seemed to shift weight and edge depending on how he held it, light as a rapier one moment and heavy as a cleaver the next.

[Deck Manifested: Wanderer’s Edge]

”It’s not deciding what it is yet,” he said, testing the balance. ”Maybe that’s the point.”

Kira’s manifestation dropped the temperature of the whole cave by several degrees, frost spreading delicate and lace-thin from her fingertips, small shards of ice already orbiting her wrists like patient, waiting teeth.

[Deck Manifested: Frostbind Snare]

”Cold hands,” she said, wry as ever. ”Warm intentions. Mostly.”

And Emma’s came last, bright enough that everyone had to look away for a moment, gold-white light gathering into twin discs that hovered at her shoulders, radiant and eager.

[Deck Manifested: Solflare]

”Finally,” Emma said, grinning at the light like it was an old friend arriving late. ”I get to be the loud one again.”

Natalia looked around at all of them, nine new decks settling into nine tired, resolute bodies, and felt something steady itself in her chest for the first time since they’d arrived.

”Then let’s see what they’re actually worth,” she said. ”Back out there.”

---

The blood-thorn stalkers found them within the hour, a pack of them breaking from the twisted treeline in a single coordinated rush, fast and low and hungry for the same fresh blood the Gravemaw had smelled the day before.

Natalia’s first arrow sang before it landed, the note ringing sharp enough to make three stalkers flinch mid-stride, and the second arrow took the lead one clean through the throat while it was still recovering.

”They flinch at the sound,” she called. ”Use it!”

Emma’s discs answered with a flare of gold light that scattered across the pack, blinding and searing in the same breath, and where the light touched thorned hide, it simply burned the darkness out of the creature underneath.

Jian waded into the rest with lightning coiled around both fists, and every strike that landed left the target twitching, muscles locked by current that had nowhere else to go.

Kira’s frost caught two stalkers mid-leap, ice climbing their legs and locking their charge into a stumble that Marcus’s floating markers immediately flagged, redirecting Julian’s next ember-wreathed strike directly into the opening.

It was fast, and it was clean, and it was almost too easy.

Almost.

---

The root-wraith did not announce itself the way the stalkers had.

It came up through the ground itself beneath Noah’s feet, roots the color of old wounds bursting free and wrapping around his legs before he’d even registered the ground had moved, dragging him down hard and fast toward soil that pulsed like something breathing beneath it.

”Noah!” Kira’s shout cracked across the clearing.

He got his new blade around in time to cut one root free, the weapon shifting heavier in his grip the instant it mattered, but three more replaced the one he’d severed, and the ground beneath him opened wider, dragging him under to the waist.

Maya’s mirage split apart and reformed around him in an instant, three copies of herself grabbing at roots that couldn’t tell true flesh from illusion, buying real hands the half second they needed to close on his arms and haul.

It wasn’t enough on its own. The wraith’s grip tightened, and Noah’s breath left him in a strangled gasp as the pressure crushed inward on his ribs.

Kayla was already there, vines from her own deck lashing out to wrap the pulling roots and fight them for the same ground, green light straining against old red malice in a contest that hung, for one terrible moment, entirely undecided.

”Pull!” Marcus shouted, markers flaring bright around the wraith’s weakest seam. ”There, all of you, pull!”

They pulled. Noah came free in a rush of torn root and dark soil, gasping and bleeding from a dozen shallow cuts, and the moment he was clear, Kayla’s vines surged over him in earnest, green light pouring into cracked ribs and bruised lungs alike.

”Breathe,” she said, steady despite her own racing pulse. ”I’ve got you. Breathe.”

He breathed. The wound that should have kept him down for hours closed within minutes instead, Bloomheart Ward working faster and deeper than any of Kayla’s old lattices ever had, and by the time the root-wraith reared back for a second attempt, Noah was back on his feet with color returning to his face.

Jian and Julian finished the wraith together, lightning and fire meeting in the same wound at once, and it went still and silent, sinking back into ground that no longer pulsed at all.

”That’s twice now,” Noah said, breathless, staring at hands that had nearly disappeared into that hungry earth. ”Twice I almost didn’t come back from this place.”

”Third time’s not happening,” Natalia said, low and fierce. ”Not on my watch.”

---

The Marrow Colossus found them at dusk, and it did not bother sneaking.

It rose out of the treeline whole and enormous, a thing built from the bones of everything the Wilds had ever killed, fused together into a shape too large for the clearing to properly hold, and its first step alone cracked the ground wide enough to swallow a person whole.

”That’s not a monster,” Marcus said, markers spinning fast around him as he read the threat. ”That’s this whole forest’s grudge, wearing a body.”

”Then let’s give it a reason to regret keeping score,” Natalia said, and loosed an arrow straight for its skull.

The fight that followed cost every one of them something.

Julian took a glancing blow from a fist the size of a boulder and went down hard, Emberclaw flickering as the impact drove the breath from his lungs entirely, and only Kira’s frost, thrown fast and desperate, froze the follow-up strike just enough to buy Kayla the half second she needed to reach him.

Jian’s lightning cracked bone plating that nothing else had managed to touch, and the effort cost him a fist that swung wide and clumsy afterward, current spent past what his own body could safely hold.

Maya’s mirages bought time again and again, absorbing strikes meant for real flesh, until the Colossus finally learned to tell true from false and one crushing blow caught her real body across the shoulder, throwing her twenty feet and leaving her gasping in the dirt.

”Maya!” Emma’s discs blazed brighter than they had all fight, light lancing down to cover her while Kayla’s vines raced across broken ground to reach her next.

For one long, terrible stretch, it looked like the Wilds might finally collect what it had been owed since the very first day.

Then Natalia’s next arrow found the seam Marcus’s markers had been tracking all along, the exact point where every bone in that towering body met and depended on the ones around it, and the note that arrow sang on release was louder than any before it.

The Colossus shuddered.

Noah drove Wanderer’s Edge into the widening crack, blade shifting heavy at the exact moment it needed weight, and Jian’s last reserve of lightning poured through the opening a heartbeat later, current finding every fused bone at once and turning stolen strength against itself.

The whole vast shape came apart at last, bones scattering across a clearing gone suddenly, blessedly quiet.

---

They tended each other in the falling dark the way they’d learned to over these last days, only faster now, easier, green light and quiet vine-work closing wounds that would have kept any of them bedridden a week earlier.

Julian sat up first, breath still ragged but steady, and looked around at eight equally battered, equally alive faces.

”We almost lost people twice today,” he said. ”And we’re still standing.”

”Because of the decks,” Kayla said, hands still glowing faint as she worked down the last of Maya’s bruised shoulder. ”Because of each other. Both, maybe.”

Natalia looked out at the wreckage of the Colossus, bones already beginning to sink back into hungry, red-lit ground, and felt the same steady thing settle in her chest that had settled there back in the cave.

”Tomorrow, we go further in,” she said. ”Whatever’s worse than that thing is still out there. We might as well meet it while we’re already this awake.”

Nobody argued. Nine bruised, healing, unbroken people sat together under a sky that never quite went dark, and for the first time since destroying everything they’d built, none of them doubted they’d chosen right.